Time and Place: The cold house with a warm heart

Growing up on a housing estate in Perth gave Stuart Cosgrove a taste for both football and theatre

If whoever now lives in the house in which I was brought up went into what was my bedroom and peeled off the wallpaper, they’d probably find the St Johnstone football team of about 1961 scribbled on the wall.

Most of the time the wallpaper was woodchip, but there was a time, probably for a couple of years, when it was cowboy scenes. When I was seven my dad died and his brother, my uncle Billy, became my surrogate dad. It was him who took me to St Johnstone matches. And he’d be the one who would decorate my bedroom. So, when it was time for the cowboy paper to go, we were stripping it off and he said: “Let’s leave a little memento for people living in the house in the future.”

So, I wrote the team on the wall and then we put new wallpaper over it. And